B-

C+

C

C-

D+

D

D-

F

TITANIC won a best pic oscar; so did CHARIOTS OF FIRE. Geez, KRAMER VS KRAMER beat APOCALYPSE NOW and ALL THAT JAZZ for Oscar, and don't get me started on how BOUND FOR GLORY, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, TAXI DRIVER and especially NETWORK could lose to ROCKY. That's up there in WTF! with BABE beating APOLLO 13 for the VFX oscar.

With all that in mind, yeah, sadly it's possible SKYFALL could win an Oscar. But just because you can do a thing, Academy, doesn't mean you should ... especially with this one.

Man I REMEMBER how many great films should have been in competition in place of CHARIOTS ... Just in terms of non-nominated films, TAPS, TRUE CONFESSIONS and RAGTIME blew me away (and the latter two STILL impress), while I actually fell asleep on CHARIOTS (had already bought the soundtrack, so it was all downhill from there.) ABSENCE OF MALICE, while nominated for director and most of the cast, also didn't get a bestpic nod.

If the greatest thing Bond and M can do for the world at large and for the ordinary bystanders is not further endanger them/get them killed by having their confrontation with Silva out in the open - well, that still does nothing to answer the question that was posed in the movie itself, why the fuck is MI6 needed in the first place?

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I guess the lesson they took from the fan backlash to Die Another Day, which also had a valedictory tone filled with callbacks to earlier movies, is that the worst the series can do is do outsize villains any more. And since political correctness drastically reduces other ethnic/nationalist options, rogue ex-agents are an easy and obvious alternative (see: the first three Mission: Impossibles). Another route is to reboot SPECTRE, which they tried with Quantum, but understandably let go of here, as that was also a pretty stupid idea. (Fact is, white spies just aren't very useful in a post-Cold War world.)

The result, as you observe, is narrative claustrophobia, covered in lots of shiny paint. Here's one of my favorite critics, Tom Shone:

The result is good-looking, dramatically inert, high-end filmmaking that invites its audience to feel superior to cheap thrills it doesn't have the faintest idea how to produce.

[...] Should Bond be this beautiful? The series always dreamed of sophistication, of course, with its martinis and jet travel and beautiful exotica — those complaining about product placement in the new film ought to remember that Fleming was dropping labels decades before Bret Easton Ellis was spitting out his pacifier — but it was the pseudo-sophistication of the business traveller, doomed to curdle into kitsch. That is what made Casino Royale such a blessed relief, for here was Bond played straight, with a new Bond who was blonde and tough and cool again. Given this, Mendes decision to revisit the theme of the Timothy Dalton Bonds — Bond as dinosaur, ribbed by his younger colleagues for being out-of-date — is all the more baffling, a self-inflicted defeat just inches from the end zone. What sense does it make to have M hauled in front of a government oversight committee and told that era of human intelligence is past, when what revivified the whole Bond franchise in the first place was the renewed threat of terrorism? The contemporary resonance is there on a plate.
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I guess that for most, the shiny paint was enough.

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I find it hard to take seriously any crtic who can't even get his basic facts right. Dalton's 007 ribbed as a dionosaur? I don't think so...

But as for relevance, surely in a time when more and more of a spotlight is being shone on the covert world, when organisations like wikileaks and anonymous exist, surely this was relevent?

Trouble is Casino Royale convinced people that Bond could work as a gritty realistic spy, but aside from From Russia with Love, and maybe For Your Eyes Only, the Bond films have never been about gritty realistic spy thrillers, and quite frankly I don't want them to be. When I want something approaching real spying I'll watch the awesomeness that is Tinker Tailor, what I want is slick action, wit and wish fulfillment I'll watch Bond. This was my argument over the Bournification too, when I want to watch Bourne (maybe if I need to sleep) I'll watch a Bourne film, when I want to watch Bond I'll watch a Bond film and, for me at any rate, Skyfall is the irst Craig film to truly 100% feel like a Bond film.

And I kinda like that Bond doesn't win (although you could argue he does to a certain extend given Silva is neutralised, and, perhaps more importantly, dies thinking he's failed) Skyfall is one of the films of 2012 that didn't quite go where you expected it to (along with Looper).

As for Oscars, I'll be surprised if Skyfall doesn't pick up a couple, if only for cinematography and maybe Dench as supporting actress, though I'll be surprised if Mendes doesn't at least get a nomination for best director.

Man I REMEMBER how many great films should have been in competition in place of CHARIOTS ... Just in terms of non-nominated films, TAPS, TRUE CONFESSIONS and RAGTIME blew me away (and the latter two STILL impress), while I actually fell asleep on CHARIOTS (had already bought the soundtrack, so it was all downhill from there.) ABSENCE OF MALICE, while nominated for director and most of the cast, also didn't get a bestpic nod.

Did he really fail the tests because he's actually bad at target practice, or was he trying to make it seem like he was bad at them?

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No, it's the former. I thought it was pretty obvious. That's why he was surprised when he found out he didn't pass later on.

The movie itself was also an excuse.. for itself. He had to chase down and beat up a bad guy in Shanghai. Why? Because Shanghai looked kewl.

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Couldn't the same be said for Jamaica, Istanbul, Japan (except to bring in Ninja Commandos), Hong Kong, Egypt, Uganda, Italy, etc. That's the whole point about James Bond that sets it apart. They seek out beautiful exotic locations.

Did he really fail the tests because he's actually bad at target practice, or was he trying to make it seem like he was bad at them?

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No, it's the former. I thought it was pretty obvious. That's why he was surprised when he found out he didn't pass later on.

The movie itself was also an excuse.. for itself. He had to chase down and beat up a bad guy in Shanghai. Why? Because Shanghai looked kewl.

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Couldn't the same be said for Jamaica, Istanbul, Japan (except to bring in Ninja Commandos), Hong Kong, Egypt, Uganda, Italy, etc. That's the whole point about James Bond that sets it apart. They seek out beautiful exotic locations.

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I've seen it twice and I didn't find it obvious. The character by nature is stoic, and always is supposed to have a plan within a plan, and, by that logic, intentionally gives off whatever external veneer will suit his purpose, so there's no way for me to know that he failed them by accident, and Craig's take on the character is rather wooden (which is I guess how Bond is supposed to be, which is a problem) that I found myself unsure. Maybe he wanted Ralph Fiennes to think he wasn't as good as he used to be at targets and all the other tests. I have no idea, and Craig doesn't have the charisma of an 80's or 90's era Harrison Ford to let me know with a mere glance if he meant to fail or not.

I'm not a big Alec Baldwin fan by any means, but watch his nuanced performance in Hunt for Red October. There, a mere expression will tell you that he thinks he's in over his head, and even if he doesn't betray these feelings to a character he's talking to, we still get it.

As for your second point, I agree. Just as I agree that Trek movies are not praised for their glory shots of the enterprise. But they have them anyway. Why is this film being praised beyond the usual accolades of other Bond films?

Also, is it just me, (and this occurred to me within the first minutes of the film on my first viewing) but didn't this film have exactly the same plot as the first Mission: Impossible film?

Yes, he has to get some disk that has a list of agents on it. Yup, sounds familiar and altogether unoriginal to me.

I guess with the cold war over, they can't think of what kind of spy plots to make anymore, so instead of spies actually spying on countries or leaders or whatever, all the spy movies are about protecting the identities of other spies. Geesh!

Well in "For Your Eyes Only" Bond had to recover a decoder that would potentially allow a foreign government to read British Intel. Which is more or less the same recover somethingwhich could harm our intelligence operations if the wrong people got ahold of it.

Or shall we go back to a real world example. Were the Allies wanted to get their hands on the Nazi Lorenz and Engima machines.

Also, is it just me, (and this occurred to me within the first minutes of the film on my first viewing) but didn't this film have exactly the same plot as the first Mission: Impossible film?

Yes, he has to get some disk that has a list of agents on it. Yup, sounds familiar and altogether unoriginal to me.

I guess with the cold war over, they can't think of what kind of spy plots to make anymore, so instead of spies actually spying on countries or leaders or whatever, all the spy movies are about protecting the identities of other spies. Geesh!

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Yup it's exactly the same, even down to him having to go rogue and be hunted by his own side, breaking into MI6 headquarters to steal the other half of the list, having to recruit disavowed agents and work with criminals to try and expose the real traitor who, effectively, is M who was behind it all all along even though we thought she died at the start of the film and of course the was in league with Moneypenny who is shot and killed by M...

Everyone's been talking about Anne's rendition of "I dreamed a dream" for months

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Isn't the category "Best Original Song"?

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Exactly. It's for songs that were written specifically for a film released in the previous year. Songs that were released before, without having anything to do with the film, don't qualify. Songs from previously staged musicals adapted for the screen don't qualify.

Everyone's been talking about Anne's rendition of "I dreamed a dream" for months

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Isn't the category "Best Original Song"?

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Exactly. It's for songs that were written specifically for a film released in the previous year. Songs that were released before, without having anything to do with the film, don't qualify. Songs from previously staged musicals adapted for the screen don't qualify.

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Yeah, I remember a song from Moulin Rouge! was disqualified because Baz Luhrmann actually wrote it for Romeo + Juliet.

Also, is it just me, (and this occurred to me within the first minutes of the film on my first viewing) but didn't this film have exactly the same plot as the first Mission: Impossible film?

Yes, he has to get some disk that has a list of agents on it. Yup, sounds familiar and altogether unoriginal to me.

I guess with the cold war over, they can't think of what kind of spy plots to make anymore, so instead of spies actually spying on countries or leaders or whatever, all the spy movies are about protecting the identities of other spies. Geesh!

Click to expand...

Yup it's exactly the same, even down to him having to go rogue and be hunted by his own side, breaking into MI6 headquarters to steal the other half of the list, having to recruit disavowed agents and work with criminals to try and expose the real traitor who, effectively, is M who was behind it all all along even though we thought she died at the start of the film and of course the was in league with Moneypenny who is shot and killed by M...

Yeah, exactly the same plot...

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Obviously, you spend more time being a wise-ass than reading all of my post or my previous post to actually engage my actual point.

Some aspects of the villain reminded me of Alec Trevelyan from GoldenEye (one of my favorite Bond villains). Former Agent, went renegade, now has his own Evil Syndicate, etc. Except Trevelyan had a history with Bond and a personal vendetta on him, whereas Javier Bardem had one with M instead.